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Not much to say about this, but I rather loved it.

One bit that sounded interesting was the difference between the girl and the guy... the girl seemed to be described more like a photograph or memory. While the guy was always present and there, the girl was always described passively, even if she was doing something aggressive (like, with the knife). But I liked and appreciated that because it gave her a softer, more feminine quality.

Nice poem!

CUTTING UP RED BELL PEPPERS.

I remember that.

When you're hitting flow just right, there's something else you need to keep in mind: whether what you're saying actually sings. I'll take this part by part:

1.

The man lying next to you wants to be inside you. His hands scamper along your body, speaking to you like sentient pets. He’s broad-chested, towheaded, and his ripped red t-shirt thrown across the bed reminds you of your heart—so you let him in. He stretches into you and everything inside coils, like he’s digging in a screw to fix the parts of you that don’t work. You think he wants to save you. You think you love him.

Flow is good. FIrst line doesn't stand up to much, and nor does 'sentient pets.' Replace with something that really means something -- in the case of the first line, make it something that is more inventive; a much more original point of difference. In the case of the second, keep the beat of the lines but change the words 'sentient pets' which sound too ugly for this. But last couple of lines are great -- just the right amount of ambiguity slashed with certainty to keep us wondering.

2.

Now he’s always inside you, and when he isn’t you remember him inside you, how you only make love with the blinds closed. He never speaks at night so the darkness speaks for him, wanting to peel the skin from your body and find whatever still beats inside you, the cogs of your innards still winding, still counting down the hours. At dawn, blades of light shove through the slatted blinds, cutting up the bodies, yours and his, still so knotted together that his hands are your hands and your heart is his heart.

Similar wording problem in the first line -- the flow is fantastic; the words themselves are not. The problem is originality. We know about their sex. Now, tell us something different. It only gets better at 'how you only make love with the blinds closed' -- but it is a marginal change. I want variety here. Something even more striking, quirky, bizarre. Surprise me.

Again, last couple of lines were good. I like the newness that 'innards still winding, still counting down the hours' and 'light...cutting up the bodies' provides. I never thought of it that way -- and you know what? This is when I love your writing the most -- when you present to me something I think I know in an entirely different manner.

3.

Sometimes you think of her, of the ring jammed in the pocket of your jeans. He knows about her, of course. He asked about the band of pale skin around your finger, but only after he pulled you apart at the seams and stitched you back together into a creature that would love him. He holds you closer because he knows she’s there, as though in this moment you belong to him even more because you don’t.

Not bad, not great. Perhaps leaning too much towards the very-obvious-and-I-should-have-suspected-this-in-the-first-place-love-triangle -- and you know I don't like to be let down by lack of surprise like that. I don't like how predictable this is getting. I think you need this part there, somewhere; you just need another section before it, something to distance us from the immediacy of the two men; something to pull us back before getting back to the present again. This is too close, for too long. Keep the balances tipping.

4.

You turn to her on the days you miss him. She’s in the kitchen, standing at the sink before the window, chopping red bell peppers. The light sweeps over her, unraveling the dark threads of her hair. You come from behind, fingers aligning along the curve of her waist like stars, like the constellation you could always point out to her, before you realized the stars are just stitches of light, holding together the sky. Your fingers move to the pulse at her wrist, to the hand that holds the kitchen knife, her grip loosening as she bends into you. You wish she’d press that knife to your throat, carve a scar into your jaw to remind you that she loves you. But she will only cut the bell peppers, their flesh bright and doomed.

Hee, this is why I used those red bell peppers in the first place. There's something weirdly...weird...about them that added just the dash of originality that the scene needed. I want your 'stars are just stitches of light, holding together the sky' metaphor to work properly -- it's beautiful, but also does not stand up to much thought. Make it work. Make it work seamlessly. Make your mad logic work -- that is what I find more dazzling than a halfway-there metaphor.

Cut this para at 'your jaw to remind you that she loves you.' That's the bang. The rest is frayed ends, loose, chapped, fairly meaningless and songless.

5.

Standing in the shower, you wash his fingerprints from your skin. The showerhead spits at you, the water rubs its hands along your flanks. You scrub until the water spins pink at the drain—but you can’t clean the bruises flung across your chest and your neck, where his mouth lingered, where he broke the capillaries and sometimes broke the skin. Your blood is in his mouth, corroding his teeth as they jut into a jagged grin. It splits his face in half.

Read Siken's 'Dirty Valentine' -- see how he intersperses the blatantly predictable with the unpredictable? I like the idea of grins splitting faces in half, and I originally misread 'showerhead spits at you' as 'showerhead splits you' -- the latter of which I prefer. Use these and magnify them, amplify them. The rest doesn't grab me. Mold what does.

6.

On hot nights she clings to you as though shipwrecked, as though in sleep she understands that everything around her is collapsing. You hold your breath beneath her touch. The muscle in your jaw stops working. You ask the darkness for an answer, but the room frays at the edges, the plane of your vision blurs. Through the window the crickets sing, striking their wings together, bodies breaking for love.

Actually, in some ways I feel like there's almost no room for the woman in this. It's too short, too focussed to have her as anything more than a mere mention, a memory, a ring in a pocket. When you collapse the aesthetic distance this quickly between the reader and her character, it seems a little bit like singing nursery rhymes in the middle of a pop song -- a kind of 'bizarre' that I don't appreciate. Too odd. I almost don't care for her, and I think I know why: the MC's focus isn't really her -- or, at least, hasn't been introduced to be her in the very beginning. It's almost too late to shout out, BUT HEY HE HAS A WIFE or that he cares about her in any way. We're too entertained by the melodrama of the two men to care about what seems to come across as a 'side-issue,' despite the fact that it probably isn't one.

If that makes any sense.

7.

You’re slung across the wasteland of the bed, wet shirt clinging to your skin, the crust of blood on your knuckles. The light fled from his eyes when you said you were afraid to leave her—he hurled the vodka bottle at the wall, broken glass streaking like stars and puncturing the space between you. He struggled with you, four arms binding together, untwisting as he wrenched himself away.

8.

Alone, you want to touch yourself but are afraid, the silence lying all around you,

a gutted thing.

Oh no. I almost didn't finish this review on account of this ending. You end your other paras so spectacularly; why not this? Why not the very end? Keep working at it -- it dangles fairly shoddily as it is. Doesn't do much justice to the parts in your piece that did sing.

Regardless, we need a title change.

PM for comments, discussions, questions.

Navi

Hi there.

I did really like this. I don't think I've ever seen poem (if you could call it a poem) that uses a list and numbering like this. So I do have to applaud you for taking that risk.

However it can also be its downfall. As I said before it's hard to call it a poem.

But the language is very good. Very rich and satisfying.

So good job.